eBay, an online retailer, has announced that it will cut around 1,000 roles, which is an estimated 9% of its current workforce. eBay CEO Jamie Iannone stated in a letter to employees, “While we are making progress in line with our strategy, our overall headcount and expenses are outpacing business growth.” He added, “To address this, we are implementing organizational changes to align and integrate certain teams to improve the end-to-end experience and better meet the needs of our customers around the world.”
In addition to the job cuts, the company plans to reduce the number of “in-term” contracts. Iannone added, “alternative workforce.” He also stated that company administrators would notify employees whose roles were “eliminated” and asked all eBay staff to work from home on Wednesday “to ensure space and privacy for conversations.” He added, “We recognize that these actions are not something we take lightly and they impact all eBayers. We must say goodbye to people who have made many important contributions to the eBay community and culture, and this is not an easy task.” Last February, eBay laid off 500 employees, 4% of its workforce worldwide, citing a slowdown in consumer spending for the boom in e-commerce spending during the pandemic.
The number of layoffs within Silicon Valley has accelerated recently, with some of the world’s most prominent technology companies instituting large-scale layoff programs in recent months. A memo sent by Google CEO Sundar Pichai earlier this month warned staff that more job cuts could occur this year as the company looks to increase investment in artificial intelligence. The company will cut its workforce by 12,000 in early 2023. This comes after Mark Zuckerberg’s “meta” revealed in March last year that the company plans to cut 10,000 jobs from a peak of 87,000 employees in 2022. This month, language learning app Duolingo also lost about 10% of its contract employees as part of the company’s move to increase its reliance on AI.
Amazon cut hundreds of jobs across its streaming platform Twitch and its film and TV studio division in the second week of January. In December, music streaming service Spotify announced plans to cut 17% of its workforce, which equates to about 1,500 fewer employees.
According to data, more than 13,000 people have been laid off at 72 companies so far this year, according to layoffs.fyi, which tracks job losses in the tech industry.
Source: www.theguardian.com
